There was but a single vessel in the harbour—a schooner, laid up for the winter. Its masts looked thin and, as it were, leafless, with the sails and rigging taken down. The boys had built themselves a snow hut out on the ice under its bowsprit. The current of the Belt was too strong just here for the ice to hold it altogether in check; a little farther north, there had been a battle between the two, and the ice had lost. Mighty sheets of it came floating down the channel; off the mole, they packed and closed in an angry whirl, setting their teeth in the piles, but were torn away ruthlessly and sent on southward again.
In the curve of the channel between the black woods, the ice-floes looked like a flock of white swans on a blue lake. The grey-green line of hills on the Jutland side looked far away in the misty air, though the distance was not so great but that one could count the windows of the ferry station over between the trees.
Egholm’s brain had rested for just the space of time it took to turn his head from right to left and back again. Now it began hammering again; he had caught sight of a certain green-painted dinghy down by the harbour, and that particular craft interested him more than all the other rowing boats in the world.
But—in Heaven’s name—how was he to gain possession?
He rose, and went down into the coal-cellar of the church, where he commenced to pray. His thoughts were confused with excitement, he did not understand his own words, and when he stood up again, the coals came rattling down with a sound as of scornful laughter. Could a man go to the devil and get hold of fifty kroner that way?
Or, could not a man settle the business himself, by his own unaided power? Why this constant begging round?
Egholm walked out of the churchyard, talking to himself, and took the road to Kongeskoven—thus completing the whole circuit of the town and neighbourhood for that day.
All his inventions, were they of no more value when it came to the point than that he must die of hunger? Surely there should be some appreciation of them—at any rate, in higher quarters. He thought of some of the more important; not mere ideas he had busied himself with to pass the time, shaking them out of his sleeve like a conjurer, but those that were really worth something, say, a million.
As, for instance, the pair of frictionless wheels for railway carriages—that should have meant an income to the inventor out of every pair of wheels in all the world, if only God had lifted a little finger to help.
And then that preparation of his for turning yellow bricks red—a profit of several kroner per thousand of bricks!